Exercise
Healthy Bodies Have a Powerful Capacity to Change
Our bodies have an amazing capacity for growth and change. Exercise is a necessary part of keeping our whole self-healthy. They are designed to be active. When we live a sedative lifestyle day and day, week after week and year after year our bodies begin to fail. Keeping your body active is important for a long vigorous life.
You may not be the type of person who wants to train for a triathlon and that's perfectly okay. You don't have to become a fitness buff to benefit from exercise and movement. Start by committing to getting some form of activity into your life often during the day, especially if your work dictates that you're sitting a lot. Schedule exercise like any other appointment on your calendar and treat it as a commitment, rather than something you squeeze in only if you have time. Even if you can only allot 15 minutes at a time, schedule it. I truly believe my real fitness began when I started to use my affirmation, "I am a lean, mean machine because I eat right and exercise daily."
Take a short walk-at a leisurely pace at first, if exercise is new to you. You can build up to a power walk. If that's not your thing, take a fitness, martial arts, or yoga class, swim laps, or sign up for dance classes. Whatever exercises you start, build up slowly so you don't overwhelm yourself and then maybe give up.
Exercise aims to maintain or enhance your physical fitness and general health. Going to extremes is unnecessary and can be unhelpful. Most of the research I've done shows that you need to get your heart pumping at an aerobic pace for 30 minutes, 3-4 time per week. Also, when you choose your exercises, mix them up so that you use as many different muscles in your body as you can. For example, in a week's time, you could mow the lawn, go swimming, do pushups, sit-ups and free weights in the garage, and go for a brisk walk with a buddy. The main thing is to be active consistently.
Healthy bodies have a powerful, and genius immune system to help fight off all kinds of aliments. How does it work? Your immune system uses a huge army of defender cells-different types of white blood cell. You make about a billion of them every day in your bone marrow. Some of these cells, called macrophages, constantly patrol your body, destroying germs and other pathogens as soon as they are encountered. This is your natural or inborn immunity. If an infection begins to take hold, your body fights back with an even more powerful defense of T-cells and B-cells. They give you acquired immunity, so that the same germ can never make you as ill again.
